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Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

theoutline.com

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Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

#61

Post by jackmott »

ClayM wrote: post #16

I've been paid to write code for 20 years or so and can't remember any of those friggin algorithms. Being able to understand a problem enough to successfully google an answer is the most valuable skill for a programmer.

How do you know the answer you find is a good one?

Say you think you need a binary tree, so you can get Log(n) lookup, you look it up, implement it, it works, great. Not bad.

Then a lady comes along who actually understands the problem domain, and knows that cache locality will be a big win in this case, and she uses a sorted array with a binary search. Latency is cut in half and the company makes a brazillon dollars. Better.

Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

#62

Post by digler999 »

entee wrote: post #56
vp89 wrote: post #48

Its counter intuitive but whiteboarding is actually more inclusive IMO. Anyone who has 35 bucks can lock themselves in a room for 3 months with a copy of CTCI and a pad of paper and come out with an 80+k salary. You cant do that in any other industry. If we judge candidates purely on work experience that just favors the incumbents who have already broken into the industry and presumably already quite comfortable in l…

That assumes the interview accurately measures something useful. The more I read about this area the more I think a 1-2h pre-interview practical coding assignment, then a 1 on 1 discussion during the interview is better. You then get to understand how they think, how they design solutions, and some sense of how they interact. In other words, how they'd do the job.

> a 1-2h pre-interview practical coding assignment

then you'll only select for people who have nothing better to do with their time than to donate it to your fun programming escapade. Experienced devs will say it's not worth their time and wont apply.

Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

#63

Post by sp332 »

jackmott wrote: post #25
aanm1988 wrote: post #8

> “Whiteboard” interviews are widely hated. They also discriminate against people who are already underrepresented in the field. I don't particularly like whiteboard interviews. How can they be discrimination if the expectations are laid out and are such that anyone can reasonably practice to reach them. I understand you can create a test that is deliberately discriminatory (e.g. voting tests). You can create a test…

underrepresented candidates have been acing our whiteboard interviews, and getting hired. The whole meme is so stupid I want to cry. "Asking field-relevant questions with objective answers is discriminatory, instead just have a chat. " Mother of god. Yes I understand the limitations and downsides of whiteboard questions, and in fact in future I'm thinking I won't do them on white boards anymore. But I'll still be ask…

Asking them to do real programming is good. Asking them to remember things from an irrelevant layer of abstraction and write code in a way that is very unlike the actual job is the problem.

Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

#64

Post by davydog187 »

franciscop wrote: post #4

I cannot load this page on mobile. When trying to scroll it moves back up. Firefox doesn't offer me to set up the "view mode" for it and Save as PDF is also broken. It's funny how, from memory, all the pages that were broken because of some fancy effect were about programmers.

Hey franciscop, I'm a dev at the Outline. Can you tell me which browser version / device you are on? Thanks for the feedback

Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

#65

Post by stale2002 »

jjuel wrote: post #59
stale2002 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sarcasm. If you don't know what fizz buzz means, it means that you didn't even bother to spend 5 minutes googling "programming interview questions". Do you really want to hire someone who didn't bother to put in even the tiniest, most basic level of effort into preparing for your interview? Its like going to an onsite interview and asking "so what does this company even do anyway? I didn't check before coming her…

Why should I have to prepare for some arbitrary question, though? You could ask any number of basic "whiteboard" questions and I have to prepare for them all? So you are going to deny what could be the best candidate for someone who just did a bunch of studying prior to the interview? How does this normally turn out for you? Do they tend to last and be good employees?

Why should I have to spend 5 minutes looking up what a company does before coming into an onsite interview?

Would you deny what could be the best possible candidate because they didn't do this?

Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

#66

Post by Fargren »

adsims2001 wrote: post #40
canadian_voter wrote: post #34

Hello, my name is Tim. I'm a lead at Google with over 30 years coding experience and I need to look up how to get length of a python string. The problem with Python is the arcane, arbitrary and nonsensical syntax. It sure as hell isn't anything as obvious as length(str) or string.length like any reasonable language. And god help you if you want to do something complicated like define a function. But seriously: I have…

Seems overly harsh. Why is the actual code, "len(s)" so much worse than your suggestion of "length(s)"?

And I can't count the times I tried to do s.len() or s.length().

Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

#67

Post by pistachioknut »

brianpgordon wrote: post #60

> The process “freezes out many of the people who are underrepresented in the software development field,” Larson wrote. “If you’re busy working and raising kids, you want to spend as much of your scarce time as possible learning to code — not performing rote memorization that won’t matter once you start your job.” I'm not sure I buy this argument. If you have one candidate who has seen all of this stuff before and c…

> who do you want to hire, all else being equal?

That's the point. It's freezing out people who are equally competent, but can't perform as well at this arbitrary step.

Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

#68

Post by brianpgordon »

reboog711 wrote: post #57
ng12 wrote: post #6

> Hello, my name is David. I would fail to write bubble sort on a whiteboard. I look code up on the internet all the time. I don't do riddles. Does the interviewer explain what bubble sort is, or do they expect the candidate to know it? The first is a reasonable interview, the second one isn't.

Bubble Sort is a common sorting algorithm. I would expect anyone w/ a CS degree to know sort of what it is. But, for the most part; I can't imagine anyone ever having to write it on the job unless they are doing super low level stuff. All the 'current' languages provide sorting algorithms built in.

I feel like it probably functions more as a proxy of general algorithms knowledge. If you've forgotten even the most basic algorithms like bubble/insertion/selection/merge/quick sort then that indicates that you've been neglecting your algorithms knowledge since college.

It also kind of depends on the person. If you're interviewing an intern who's still in college, absolutely they should still remember bubble sort. If they don't know it off the top of their heads, they weren't paying attention in class. If you're interviewing someone who went to a boot camp then it would be expected that they wouldn't know a lot of the trivia like bubble sort that nobody really uses.

Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

#69

Post by stale2002 »

jjuel wrote: post #59
stale2002 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sarcasm. If you don't know what fizz buzz means, it means that you didn't even bother to spend 5 minutes googling "programming interview questions". Do you really want to hire someone who didn't bother to put in even the tiniest, most basic level of effort into preparing for your interview? Its like going to an onsite interview and asking "so what does this company even do anyway? I didn't check before coming her…

Why should I have to prepare for some arbitrary question, though? You could ask any number of basic "whiteboard" questions and I have to prepare for them all? So you are going to deny what could be the best candidate for someone who just did a bunch of studying prior to the interview? How does this normally turn out for you? Do they tend to last and be good employees?

But to answer your question more seriously, I would not hire someone who hasn't prepared at all.

Why? Because they don't care. Why would I want to hire someone who cares so little about the position that they aren't willing to put in the most basic, easiest level of effort?

If they don't care about preparing, then they probably don't care about other things, like the quality of their work.

Re: Programmers are confessing their sins to protest a broken job interview process

#70

Post by subatomic »

jackmott wrote: post #61
ClayM wrote: post #16

I've been paid to write code for 20 years or so and can't remember any of those friggin algorithms. Being able to understand a problem enough to successfully google an answer is the most valuable skill for a programmer.

How do you know the answer you find is a good one? Say you think you need a binary tree, so you can get Log(n) lookup, you look it up, implement it, it works, great. Not bad. Then a lady comes along who actually understands the problem domain, and knows that cache locality will be a big win in this case, and she uses a sorted array with a binary search. Latency is cut in half and the company makes a brazillon dollars…

For 99% of situations in normal software dev, just being able to find X in collection is enough.
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